From The Ashes Came Life-saving Changes In Safety Laws, Medicine, Plans For Emergencies

July 03, 1994|By CONSTANCE NEYER; Courant Staff Writer

Whenever the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus came to town, John B. Stewart Jr. of Hartford had the job of giving water to the elephants. He remembers marveling at the way their trunks brought the water to their mouths.

Stewart, then 14, had been working at the matinee performance on July 6, 1944, when he witnessed the worst disaster in Hartford history: the circus fire that killed 169 people. Among the dead was Stewart's 8-year-old friend Billy Dineen.

``This didn't have to happen,'' Stewart thought that night. ``I wanted to make sure this didn't happen again.''

The circus tragedy led Stewart to spend 41 years fighting fires, culminating in his service as chief of the Hartford Fire Department.

Stewart wasn't alone in feeling acutely the impact of that day. The circus fire changed lives and institutions in Hartford and across the country. Many of the changes it caused or contributed to are still felt.

* Sophisticated ambulance service replaced the dozens of Sage-Allen and G. Fox & Co. delivery trucks that carried the dead and injured to the hospital and morgue that day.

* More advanced treatment and a better-organized system of medical triage replaced the haphazard handling of the burned circus patrons.

* Hartford's city government was revamped as the city probed why it had failed to prevent the fire.

* Tough new fire prevention regulations, including some specifically aimed at circuses, were adopted in Hartford and widely copied around the country.

``The history of the world is that when a tragedy takes place, then they look at how to prevent it,'' said Stewart. ``We don't do anything until a tragedy takes place. That's the way it's been since the start of this world.''

Ambulances are ready

Ambulance service was in its infancy in the 1940s.

It was provided mostly by undertakers who picked up victims in a method informally known as ``bag 'em and drag 'em'' because drivers would wrap the injured in blankets, put them in hearses and drop them off at one of Hartford's four hospitals.

In 1944, the Connecticut War Council set up an emergency transportation plan in case Germany bombed Hartford, considered a distinct possibility with Pratt & Whitney's building aircraft engines across the river. The plan called for almost 80 delivery trucks and vans from downtown stores to carry stretchers for such an emergency.

No one, though, anticipated that the emergency they would respond to would be the circus fire on Barbour Street.

That day the American Red Cross called out hundreds of volunteers, including Lucille Majors, a 28-year-old woman who was running the Aetna Florist shop for two uncles in the Navy. Majors had installed hinges and stretchers in the back of her panel truck.

``You saw people burned so bad it was sickening,'' she said. ``I couldn't eat for days.''

She helped the injured to the hospitals and families to the morgue at the State Armory. She answered a dizzying number of requests for service.

``When you get involved with the American Red Cross, you don't refuse them anything. It's like being involved with God,'' said Majors, now 78.

``You just kept going so that you wouldn't feel the pain,'' said Majors, who worked into the wee hours after the fire.

``The circus fire taught us all a lesson,'' Majors said. ``Hartford was not equipped for it. Hartford hadn't had anything like that.''

When her uncles came back from the service, they started an independent ambulance firm because both had first-aid certificates. They purchased a used ambulance from a Manchester undertaker.

Within 20 years, most ambulances were run by independent companies in the Hartford area.

Jean S. Grady, now president and chief executive officer of Aetna Ambulance and widow of Herman Grady, one of the founders, said recently, ``People were looking for something more sophisticated than that black van. . . . The circus fire motivated them to get in the business.''

Aetna still helps provide ambulance service in Wethersfield, Rocky Hill and Newington.

Emergency plans in place

One day last week, Stewart sat in his white Ford custom van on Barbour Street and stared at the site of the circus fire, now occupied by the Fred D. Wish School.

That sweltering July 6, in the middle of the show, young Stewart heard a shout behind him and turned to find the circus tent in flames.

``There was big, thick black smoke and people running, and then the big top just collapsed. People were just trapped.''

Stewart helped the frightened people get their bearings when they came dazed out of the tent.

``I wonder if those trees over there were there when the fire broke out,'' he mused aloud. ``We could have saved 40 to 50 percent from the circus fire if we knew what we know today,'' said the 64-year- old retired fire chief.